what may or may not be hard reality

I've actually never had those problems, with neither the windows nor linux versions. Perhaps something went awry with your installation?

I've never though about the [back] thing, but I don't think my FF reloads, as I can go back fine even if I've broken the internet connection. I've had no problems with using many tabs at once (and I've had many), nor with it remembering which ones until next start-up (though I've used that remember-my-tabs setting for quite a while, now). Have you activated the remember tabs setting? And no loss of browser history.

Hmm, now that I look at the browser history for FF3, it doesn't look the same as for FF2 (when it was neatly sorted into days). I'll look around and see if I can find anything out.

Re: colours - find yourself a nice theme! ;-)